With the growing popularity of wide-area networks, such as the Internet, many business and leisure travelers are turning to online sources for their travel planning needs. The online sources are made available to the traveler in the form of a specialized “portal,” which is a web site comprising content that is tailored to a specific user or group of users. Numerous travel planning portals are available for both business and leisure travelers across the wide-area network such as biztravel.com®, yahoo.travel.com, expedia.com®, and trip.com® to name a few. Further, several portals exist that are tailored to specific needs of travelers such as disabled travelers, large group tours, and weekend travelers.
Generally, travel planning portals include a variety of information regarding a destination specified by the traveler such as flights and other modes of transportation, hotels, rental cars, and general information about the destination. For example, when a traveler searches “Austria” on the travel portal expedia.com®, a substantial amount of information becomes available, including maps, selections for booking flights, hotels, and cars, weather, and other general information regarding Austria as a destination. Further, a vertical series of buttons titled “traveler tools” are presented that include items such as health and safety, flight status, and airport information. The traveler tools selections, however, are not linked to the destination currently being searched by the traveler. If, for instance, the traveler chooses “Airport Information,” information regarding airports in Austria is not presented; rather, the traveler must manually select an airport. The information specifically pertaining to Austria is therefore somewhat limited and, at best, indirect for the user. Other travel planning portals known in the art also provide similar content in terms of planning either business or leisure travel.
Most travel planning portals include a personal profile, where the traveler can register and store numbers for frequent flyer, rental car and hotel programs, travel preferences, credit card numbers for booking reservations, and other personal contact information. These personal profiles, however, are not shared between the different travel portals and hence the traveler must register at each portal and re-enter their personal profile information. Moreover, the traveler is unable to modify the content and layout of the portal according to their personal preferences. For example, if the traveler does not want to view buttons for hotels and rental cars, known travel planning portals do not allow the traveler to modify the content of the portal to remove the hotel and rental car buttons. As a result, the traveler is forced to view portal content that is of no interest to them and therefore spends unnecessary time scanning portal content for the information that is of interest.
Travel planning portals of the known art are further limited to a ground-based use or limited in-transit use. For instance, the mobile traveler may wish to conduct travel planning not only before, but also during their travels to a particular destination or series of destinations. If the traveler were using an in-transit portal, it would be highly desirable to share the personal profiles of a traveler between the in-transit portal and the ground-based portal, thereby providing a seamless interface for the traveler whether they are traveling or not. In this respect, the traveler experiences a common and consistent interface regardless of the portal being accessed and their personal profiles are maintained throughout.
Accordingly, there remains a need in the art for a ground-based travel planning portal that allows the traveler to modify the content and layout thereof according to their personal preferences. Further, a ground-based travel planning portal is needed that is integrated with a counterpart in-transit travel portal to provide a common and seamless interface regardless of the travel status of the user.